


someone you loved

by superfluouskeys



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Emet-Selch/Azem is mostly implied/possibly one-sided, Female Azem, Gen, Patch 5.3: Reflections in Crystal Spoilers, ambiguous and unnamed female WoL
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:53:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28495644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfluouskeys/pseuds/superfluouskeys
Summary: He tells himself that he has erred, that it could not possibly be her.  It’s sad, really, and a downright shame, but after all this time, and like so much else, he has just simply forgotten the exact colour of her soul.
Relationships: Azem & Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch, Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch & Warrior of Light
Comments: 6
Kudos: 29





	someone you loved

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I find myself wanting to say a lot here, but most of it is irrelevant. I joined this [very nice discord](https://discord.gg/enabling-debauched-xivfic) and it has been amazing for helping me get some motivation back for writing! I hope you enjoy, and if you know me already, I am terribly sorry that Final Fantasy controls my last remaining brain cell now.

It is shameful, really, how much has been lost to time. Oh, sure, he’s gone on about the big things, but there’s so much more than that. So many faces, so many voices he labours to call to mind--friends, family, people he saw every day, or as often as he could. Oh, if only he could see them, hear them just one more time, he is certain he would never forget again.

How could he have known he would need to hold onto them for so long?

There would have been no way to prepare, even if he had known. What’s a thousand years to an immortal? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?

Somewhere in the dreary, pallid present, he feels a pair of eyes upon him.

“What?” he snaps.

The vaunted hero of the Source, the one they call the Warrior of Light, is smiling at him. The sight of it makes his stomach turn.

“Thank you,” she says, in a tone rich with emotion just barely concealed. “I’m sure you did it for your own reasons, but…” she glances over her shoulder to where her companions are gathered round the white-haired Miquo’te he has just recently plucked from the Lifestream.

Emet-Selch lifts a shoulder. “You all looked so pitiful, I had to do something,” he says airily.

He means to say more, something about how it hardly matters, but suddenly the twisted shade is entirely too close, and the sheer radiance of her aether nearly drives him to retreat. She claps a hand on his shoulder, and it is for naught but the sake of his pride that he holds his ground.

“Whatever it meant to you,” she says, eyes alight in a way that is achingly familiar, “it means a great deal to us.”

And then she turns away to rejoin her comrades, and Emet-Selch is left feeling as though he’s sustained an injury.

He cannot help but continue to watch her after that. It’s not exactly that he’s wondering of whom she reminds him, but rather, whether he really wants to know. He has seen familiar shades before. Perhaps predictably, they tend to show themselves most readily when freshly rejoined—but even in those dreadful early days he had caught glimpses.

He closes his eyes against the memory of _her_. She had even looked the same that time, he thinks, though he has since purposefully done his best to forget the incident. She was so small, so weak. It disturbed him to see her that way. He felt as though she ought to be resting, ought to be ailing, but she smiled the same crooked smile and her hair caught the light in the same way it had that one afternoon when they’d lowered their hoods and laid together in the grass beneath the setting sun.

“I got into terrible trouble once,” she began.

“Once?” he’d retorted.

She’d reached across the grass to shove him, but then she stayed there, closer, so close that her sun-streaked hair brushed his bare cheek.

“I was still very young, and it was my first time in the city by myself. I wanted to wear my hair down.” She said it with such a natural lilt that it seemed only logical that she should be permitted to wear her hair however she liked.

“I’ll bet it was the lady who’s always gossiping outside the Bureau,” said Hades.

“And she’s never let me forget it, by the way,” Azem replied.

“She recently stopped me to tell me I had a loose strand of hair hanging over my mask, and that it was detrimental to community cohesion.”

Azem laughed, a rare, musical sound that set his heart aflutter. “And then,” she continued, “the Concept Clerk had the nerve to comment upon my creative potential, would you believe?”

Hades let out a huff of amusement, but the idea of a much younger, softer sort of Azem meeting with such treatment on her first day alone in the city so dear to his heart filled him with a sorrow he would have been hard-pressed to articulate. “You poor thing,” he said, the genuineness of the sentiment almost painfully obvious.

He felt the tickle of her hair against his cheek, heard the grass rustle as she turned her head toward him. Her eyes caught the light of the setting sun like dying embers, and her crooked grin set her mask just slightly askew. “You really feel bad for me, don’t you?” she teased, not unkindly.

Hades was momentarily dumbfounded, and he hesitated a moment too long before he affected a scoff. “Hardly,” he insisted. “Anyway, it seems you’ve recovered just fine.”

“Hm,” Azem conceded, perhaps a bit more easily than he’d have liked. “Well, I always wore the robes after that.”

“Are you coming or not?” asks a voice from the present, dim and distant when contrasted with the vibrant beauty of his memory.

And there are her eyes again, staring at him in just the same way, like she’s waiting for him to break, waiting for him to put voice to truths they both know are best left unspoken.

No.

He swallows down a wave of revulsion at the thought of it.

It cannot be. Not her. Not like this.

* * *

He should have kept his distance after that. Should have taken a bit of time to come to his senses, focused his energies on some other venture, anything would have done, really.

Instead, he finds her and her companions after the battle with the Lightwarden of Rak’tika. Instead, he sees her, fighting fit, as yet unchanged. Her soul is far from unaffected, ‘tis true, but it holds strong and it burns bright as ever. Indeed, now that he is looking, he wonders how he did not see the unmistakable colour of her soul before.

And because Emet-Selch has chosen to be here at this time and under these circumstances, he brings upon himself this tragic error: he begins to hope.

He could have her back. If she can survive this, then she will survive another Rejoining, and then she will be even stronger for the experience. He could even find that stupid trinket he made in the throes of grief, return some fragment of her past to her, and have her with him as he contemplates his next move.

Nevermind that Azem was against all of this from the start. Nevermind that she would abhor both his end and his means, perhaps even him, now, after all this time. Nevermind that she had been furious with him when last they had spoken, that even if she were restored to her former glory right here and now, she might well want nothing to do with him.

Nay, such logic has no place in a mind overtaken by the disease of hope.

* * *

He starts to notice the ways in which the Warrior of Light is not like Azem. Azem loved people and could talk to anyone--indeed, it was rare to catch her by herself—but the Warrior of Light often wanders the Crystarium alone long into the night, and, if she can help it, rarely speaks with anyone outside of her Scions Of Whatever They’re Calling Themselves These Days. Azem was very proud of her long, lustrous hair, while the Warrior of Light keeps hers short and leaves it largely untended.

But these are little things. There is something more, something he struggles to wrap his head around. It is the fire that’s missing, the spark of purpose, a righteous anger that lives on in the Scions, but not in her. The Warrior of Light is amiable to a fault, so amiable that she obscures herself in the will of others. Though she seldom seeks company, she never turns it away. Though she seldom seeks conflict, she never backs down. Azem would have died before she ran a string of meaningless errands for people who could do the work themselves. The Warrior of Light does this nigh-daily, without question or complaint.

He starts to tell himself that he has erred, that it could not possibly be her. It’s sad, really, and a downright shame, but after all this time, and like so much else, he has just simply forgotten the exact colour of her soul.

Really, he chides himself. Eyes that sparkle _just so_? Why, he’s never heard anything so ridiculous.

Still, she is not without her charm, this twisted and decidedly unfamiliar shadow of a person. The depth of affection she holds for her friends is as real as anything can be. Indeed, he finds himself envious of it—of those who bask in her glow and of her ability to feel such warmth. After all this time, he is not certain whether he truly remembers what it feels like to love someone.

Will it all come flooding back to him, when the world is made whole once more? Or will he falter even then, woefully out of step in what ought to be paradise? How will anyone know what to do with him after all he has suffered these long, lonely years? How could he possibly explain?

Will they know they were gone? Will they know how he grieved them?

 _Some purpose!_ cries a voice, nearer and sharper than anything in the present. _Your friends, the people you—the people you claim to love, are alive right now! And you would throw that away? For what?_

He catches sight of her again, walking in amicable silence as one of the little white-haired twins chatters enthusiastically. Perhaps in this way, he concedes, she and Azem are not so different, after all. Azem never did understand why some must die so that others might live.

* * *

The nightmares become unbearable. Sometimes he’s sure he can recall the exact shape of the tears upon her cheeks. He takes to pacing, but in this moment finds his beautiful monument to Amaurot a waking nightmare all its own. Perhaps the Warrior of Light has the right of it, he thinks, and takes himself to the Crystarium to pace, instead.

Of all the First’s tattered remnants, he certainly likes the Crystarium best. Not unlike its scrappy would-be heroes, there is a certain charm about the place. What little remains of the First is depressing by necessity, Eulmore perhaps most of all. He will be glad when all this business with Light is over and done with, and he can move onto influencing a more entertaining element.

“Oh!”

The Warrior of Light speaks, and Emet-Selch startles visibly.

“I’ll be honest,” she continues, not unpleasantly, “I haven’t given much thought to where you go when you’re not around. I didn’t expect to find you here.”

Emet-Selch scoffs quietly. “Neither did I.”

The Warrior of Light inclines her head thoughtfully. “Nor would I have taken you for a stargazer.”

“Hm,” Emet-Selch turns away, contemplating the night sky in response to her teasing suggestion. “’Tis a welcome sight in its way, I’ll concede. The overabundance of Light is a necessary evil, not one I relish.”

“What are the sorts of evil you relish?”

He casts a glance over his shoulder, almost laughing, though it feels like he’s taken a blow to the stomach. It’s something she would have said, he cannot help but think. “When you figure out how to mend the rift between worlds with flowers and kittens, you let me know,” he replies crisply.

She pulls a face. “That sounds dreadful, actually. Poisonous plants and giant, fluffy monsters everywhere? I’ll take the sin eaters.”

“How casually you jest,” he quirks a brow at her. “All in a day’s work, is it? Ready to throw in the towel already? I confess I’d hoped you’d stay sporting.”

The Warrior of Light lifts a shoulder with infuriating good humour. “What, you’d rather I snarl and say something like ‘oh, you vile, evil creature, how dare you even speak to me?’ I’m the one bothering you at the moment, after all.” She turns away suddenly and looks up into the night sky, herself. “And anyway, I don’t think that would be particularly fair. We all have our reasons for what we do, don’t we?”

“Do we?” Emet-Selch wonders, quite genuinely. “And what are your reasons? Why would you, for example, traipse about collecting lost trinkets, relaying messages for those perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, or, say, ridding a tavern basement of a few pesky rodents?”

The Warrior of Light bites the inside of her cheek thoughtfully, then turns to him with the beginnings of a wry smile. “Sometimes,” she says, “it’s useful to engender good will. Not that you’d know anything about that.”

There is a moment’s silence between them before Emet-Selch exhales softly. “Touche,” he says to the stars. “Though not for want of trying,” he amends.

The Warrior of Light hums thoughtfully. “The trouble with you,” she says, “at least—what I think—is that you’re both honest and not, and people don’t know what to make of it. They can tell you’re not telling them something, so they assume it’s—“ She waves her hand vaguely, “everything.”

“Hn.” Emet-Selch looks at her then, tries to really look at her, not as a twisted shade or an echo of what once was, but as she is now. “And I suppose you would understand why someone might prefer to keep it that way,” he says, thinking not only of her strange amicability towards himself, but also of the mysterious keeper of the Crystal Tower and how she does not seem wary of him, either.

She lets out a little huff of mirthless laughter. “Of course,” she says quietly. “Most of us can hardly stand to tell the truth to ourselves, let alone others. There are lots of reasons to lie.”

“I daresay your Scions would disagree,” says Emet-Selch curiously.

The Warrior’s smile turns softer, and just a bit sadder. “I daresay you’re probably right,” she says. “But I am not ‘my Scions,’ now, am I?” she taps her fingertips over her heart.

“But I have troubled you long enough,” she continues, and Emet-Selch cannot help but to feel that something about her has shifted monumentally from one word to the next. She lingers almost awkwardly, and seems to hesitate before she speaks again. “I am still grateful, for Y’shtola, and for what truths you have offered us.”

She nods slowly, perhaps more to herself than to him. “I think you do care, a little. Otherwise, why would you bother?”

In the pale light of the moon, he is sure he can see the exact shape of the tears upon Azem’s cheeks as the Warrior of Light bids him farewell.

* * *

He tells himself that he is possessed of infinite patience, but the way events begin to unfold proves him a rather magnificent liar. He hadn’t expected her to come this far, and he still cannot pinpoint what it is the mysterious Exarch means to do. That he holds a peculiar fondness for his champion had seemed to Emet-Selch a revelation at the time of its discovery, and yet the Exarch makes every effort to keep the Warrior of Light at arm’s length.

Evidently they are simply cut from a very different sort of cloth, for Emet-Selch rather wishes he could bring himself to leave well enough alone.

He feels himself talking too much, sharing more than she is ready to hear. He swings wildly from irritation to sorrow to a terrible, terrible longing, and in the end—

“Not that you would remember any of this?”

Wide, curious eyes, breathless wonder in the voice. “Remember?”

In the end, he wishes he had not come, or at least that he had managed to keep his distance. It is too much to bear. What is he to do with a fragment of a person who wants to remember?

* * *

It is a tremendous relief when she fails.

Indeed, everything seems to fall neatly back into place. His original plan is back on its course, he has figured out what the Exarch intended all along, and he need no longer concern himself with shadows of people he would rather not dwell upon. To play the villain is a role he knows well.

She is no Ascian, to be certain, but her strength is the stuff of legends when set against the other miscreants of this tragic shard. She will be far more useful than Vauthry, and far more _fun_. Imagine the masses she will slaughter! Imagine the armies she will bring to their knees! He rather wishes she hadn’t already taken out Eulmore’s greatest general just so he could see it again.

 _How does it feel now, Azem?_ he thinks maliciously. _You would not do Zodiark’s bidding then, but now you shall do mine._

But once the dizzying euphoria passes, he regrets even thinking such a thing. And anyway, this cannot be Azem, he reminds himself. This is just a sad husk of a something, a twisted shade turning into a sin eater like all the rest.

“I pity you,” he says, “I do.”

He does. He always did.

* * *

“Come to gloat in the tomb of your adversary? This really is bad form, Hero.”

He is little more than a shade now. Here, and not here. Soon he will fade away, along with everything else he has made.

She looks up at him with wide, gentle eyes, brimming with tears. “I missed you,” she says.

Emet-Selch--or perhaps just Hades, now--doesn’t know what to say to that. He sits next to her. She seems so much smaller now.

She scrubs her sleeve across her eyes and sniffles quietly. It’s only just now that he notices she is clutching Azem’s crystal. “I was someone you knew, before, wasn’t I?”

Hades thinks for a moment. “Yes,” he says, “and no.”

“If…if all the shards were rejoined...” She doesn’t finish the question, yet he knows what she means to ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think so.” Much as he had wished it. Even though—

“Could you tell me about her?”

He hesitates. “I could.”

“But you won’t?” Not accusatory, not cloying. Hades begins to wonder how much of the amicability he had so detested in the Source's Champion is simple resignation.

“She didn’t like me very much, either,” he deflects.

“Well then I guess we aren’t that similar.”

He hazards a glance in her direction. She is still on the verge of tears, but she is smiling up at him. It’s strange to know that this is the end, that he won’t be coming back this time. Fancifully, he wonders if things could have worked out rather differently.

She turns Azem’s crystal over in her hands. “Thank you,” she says quietly, “for saving my life. Even if--”

 _Even if you only did it because of her,_ she does not say.

 _It’s all there in the crystal,_ he wants to tell her. She’ll figure out how to read it, or she won’t, and Hades won’t be around to care. But there is more, more he would not put into what was meant to be hers.

“The crystals were made for each of the members of the Convocation." He finds himself speaking before he had fully decided to. "Azem was long gone by then, never to be replaced, not even to be spoken of. She had made a rather dramatic exit, you see. Things got worse, and I wanted to go and find her, but there was no time. I thought there would be time later. I didn’t know what would happen. So.” He gestures to the crystal.

“I found a fragment of her in the Thirteenth,” he continues. “If the worst had come to pass, I had intended to return her memories to her, the way we were meant to do with the rest of the Convocation. But when I caught sight of her, the thought fled from my mind.” 

Now, unburdened by mortal flesh, he can remember her perfectly. The fragment of the Thirteenth had been a near-exact miniature of the original, and all the more jarring for it.

“Truthfully," he closes his eyes, "I had hoped up until that moment that I might find her still whole. How could one such as she be among the sundered?”

“You said she didn’t like you very much,” the Warrior observes.

_Azem, wait!_

She whirled around to face him, tears glistening in her eyes. “Why? Are you in need of another sacrifice?”

_Do you think this is easy for me?_

She laughed coldly. “Do you think this is easy for _me?_ Do you think I would turn my back on everything, on everyone, over nothing?”

_This isn’t an island with a particular sort of berry, Azem!_

She exhaled sharply, like he had dealt her a blow. She labored to speak, and when she did, her voice was dangerously soft. “It was never about the berries, Hades.”

_Azem, you know the purpose of the Convocation—_

“Some purpose!” she cried. She ripped off her mask and threw it to the ground, so that he could see the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Your friends, the people you—the people you _claim_ to love, are alive right now!” She pointed violently to herself. “And you would throw that away? For what?”

He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know where to begin. Words died in his throat.

Azem sighed heavily. Her tear-streaked face caught the light of the setting sun. For years beyond counting, he remembered the shape of her tears more clearly than anything else about her. “Hades, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Are you truly happy to keep feeding perfectly good life to this…thing?”

All the love, all the longing, all the sympathy he had for her fled him in an instant. _It’s clear that nothing I say will make you understand._

Fresh tears welled in her fiery eyes and she began to back away. “No,” she said. “I understand perfectly.”

In the present, where he is and is not, Hades feels something that catches his attention. He looks down. The Warrior of Light has placed her hand on his, inasmuch as it is possible to do so, and he can _feel_ it, as though he were more than just a fading shadow.

“My duty, my title,” he answers her softly. “But me? It’s hard to say.”

He turns his hand over. His fingers curl around her hand in his, somehow solid enough to hold.

“There is one more thing I would tell you,” he says, glancing down at her. “Whatever you think of your Mother Hydaelyn, it is rather uniquely cruel that she should have chosen you to receive her blessing. Azem swore allegiance to none but the dictates of her own conscience. If there is aught of her legacy with which I would burden you, let it be that.”

They sit in silence for awhile after that. A distant and exceedingly foolish part of him wishes he knew how to brighten the mood, to lift her spirits, to get her laughing. He tries to catch onto a happier memory, of the days when they lay together in the grass with her hair brushing against his cheek.

“Tell me something else,” says the Warrior of Light, and Azem, both here and not here. “Something happy.”

Hades thinks for a moment. “You met Hythlodaeus?”

She nods. Of course she would have.

“He was the chief of the Bureau of the Architect,” he tells her. “He was also very fond of Azem. You couldn’t go removing concepts from the Bureau for any old reason, and rightly so, as I’m sure you can imagine. But whatever mad scheme Azem came up with, Hythlodaeus was always delighted to indulge her. And who do you think had to clean up their mess when all was said and done?”

The Warrior of Light laughs. Hades feels himself smiling.

He can see the two of them now, achingly beautiful in their clarity, lips drawn tight and shoulders shaking with barely-contained laughter, utterly failing at any semblance of contrition.

“But you know,” he says, perhaps more to himself than to his companion, “I think they had the right of it, after all.”

“About what?”

Hades lifts a shoulder, gestures vaguely. “Oh, living in the present, not worrying so much about what lies ahead.” He looks down at her. “The people you love are alive, right now. Isn’t that wonderful?”


End file.
